Democracy Now! Blog

Bill McKibben of 350.org and Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign spoke out on Monday night at a vigil at Union Square in New York City against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. It was one of 200 vigils held in response to last week’s State Department ruling claiming the pipeline’s northern leg would have a minimal impact on the local environment and climate change. [includes rush transcript]

Watch an exclusive excerpt from our 2004 interview with the legendary folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, who died Monday at the age of 94. Seeger recalls the Peekskill Riots of 1949, when he and the singer and actor Paul Robeson were attacked after they performed.

Pete Seeger’s life, like the arc of the moral universe famously invoked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., bent toward justice. He died this week at 94. Pete sang truth to power through the epic struggles of most of the last century, for social justice, for civil rights, for workers, for the environment and for peace. His songs, his wise words, his legacy will resonate for generations.

PARKCITY, Utah—A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, titled “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” directed by Brian Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Aaron’s life. A coalition of Internet activists, technologists and policy experts are joining together on Feb. 11 for “The Day We Fight Back.” As they say on their website, reflecting on the victory against SOPA, “Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance. If Aaron were alive, he’d be on the front lines."

Google will save as much as $21 million after the city overruled its own assessors and lowered the tech giant’s real estate tax, reports Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez, in column for "The New York Daily News."

The film, "Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield," has received an official nomination for 2014 best documentary by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film features longtime Democracy Now! correspondent and investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill and is directed by Richard Rowley. Click to see our many interviews with them.

TOKYO—“I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world,” wrote the journalist Wilfred Burchett from Hiroshima. His story, headlined, “The Atomic Plague” appeared in the London Daily Express on Sept. 5, 1945. Burchett violated the U.S. military blockade of Hiroshima, and was the first Western journalist to visit that devastated city. He wrote: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.” Jump ahead 66 years, to March 11, 2011, and 600 miles north, to Fukushima and the Great East Japan Earthquake, which caused the tsunami.

Watch this online-only extended interview on the life and legacy of Amiri Baraka, the poet, playwright and political organizer who died Thursday at the age of 79. We talk to four of his friends and play some of Amiri Baraka in his own words. [includes rush transcript]

This week, more news emerged about the theft of classified government documents, leaked to the press, that revealed a massive, top-secret surveillance program. No, not news of Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency, but of a group of anti-Vietnam war activists who perpetrated one of the most audacious thefts of government secrets in U.S. history, and who successfully evaded capture, remaining anonymous for more than 40 years. Among them: two professors, a day-care provider and a taxi driver.

Watch part 2 of our extended discussion with three of the antiwar activists who broke into an FBI office in 1971 in Media, Pennsylvania. They are speaking out publicly this week for the first time. [includes rush transcript]

On Wednesday, Democracy Now! will interview three peace activists who just revealed their involvement in one of the biggest mysteries of the Vietnam War era — the 1971 break-in of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The burglars took every paper in the office, including documents revealing the existence of the secret counter-intelligence program, nicknamed COINTELPRO, which at the time was targeting black nationalists, antiwar activists and Native American groups.

Now, more than ever, Democracy Now! needs your help. Each year, CREDO members vote to distribute 2013 donations funding — and how much we get depends on you. The more votes we receive, the greater our share of funding.

There has been yet another violent attack with mass casualties. This was not the act of a lone gunman, or of an armed student rampaging through a school. It was a group of families en route to a wedding that was killed.

We continue our interview about the issues leading to a skyrocketing population of aging people behind bars, and feature comments about their conditions from political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. [includes rush transcript]

Watch a video timeline of Democracy Now!’s reporting on aging political prisoners, including Lynne Stewart, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Albert Woodfox of the Angola Three and others; and see reports documenting the skyrocketing population of aging men and women expected to die behind bars in a prison system ill prepared to handle them and still oriented towards mass incarceration.

A stunning indictment has been handed down in Cincinnati, focusing attention again on police killings of people of color. This is a start for accountability and justice. Cleveland should pay attention. As the thousand people gathered there last weekend said clearly, “Black Lives Matter.”

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